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In Defense of the Black Church: America’s chickens are coming home to roost

I really didn’t expect to wake up at 10:30am to my friend calling me telling me that Jeremiah Wright had yet again found himself in a live news media frenzy at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. But, I’m going to keep this short, it’s finals week and per my cousin, I discovered people don’t like to read a lot.

In a nutshell, in the last 12 hours, Jeremiah Wright has gotten more news media coverage than wildfires and the three presidential candidates combined. It’s about time that the black community has the national platform to bring many of these issues to the forefront. The reason why Wright said that “this is an attack against the black church” is because most of what he’s saying is what gets preached from countless black folks in small towns and large cities. Although we’re not a monolithic people, I think the fact that church attendance rates have gone up in Chicago, whether it was because of the novelty of it all, and the fact that he garnered record numbers at Friendship West in Dallas and at the NAACP fundraiser in Detroit kind of dismiss the myth of him being a cult leader.

And yet again, we see FoxNews media operating on soundbytes again, I guess that’s a lost cause expecting them to be fair about the entire speech in context–I give up!

Of course Whoopi Goldberg about came across the table this morning when Elizabeth Hasselbeck talked about her attending a black church, therefore making her qualified to speak on it. This was right after Whoopi lauded Wright for saying that it was wonderful that Wright had used the metaphor about the “dozens” and how he refused to let the media and others just talk about the religion and tradition that his mother and father lived and worked in. (oops, that’s a preposition, oh well.)

All that being said, I will repeat myself yet again for the second time in this third post: anyone who thinks that Jeremiah Wright is alone in speaking about this, there are countless black women and men who preach and subscribe to this liberation theology and come from the tradition of the black church. Don’t think that he stands alone.

OHHHHH!!!

And for the record, the true initial quote of “chickens coming home to roost” was from a MALCOLM X speech in 1963–not from some FoxNews commentator. In fact Wright was merely saying that he was not the only person who viewed 9/11 as a result of America’s interesting foreign policy that seemingly states that we can do whatever we want to under the guise of democracy, to whomever, but once the criticism and the attacks come home, then all of a sudden there is a big problem.

2 thoughts on “In Defense of the Black Church: America’s chickens are coming home to roost”

Wright, of course, is being subjected to a one-sided vilification-fest by the media. They hate “uppity Negroes”; they hate anyone who is tainted by a whiff of Black nationalism; and they really hate anyone who doesn’t go along with the cherished white delusion that race is no longer an issue here.